How to Hire Reps Who Actually Know How to Sell | Andrew Johnston | 30MPC Hall of Fame

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1. 1:41

   solution around how to solve them. It creates a lot of direct alignment very quickly. Boom. What's number two? Number two is to give everyone on your executive team a quota. And by quota, I don't mean necessarily they're owning a number, but there should be some metric, something that you're holding your executive team accountable to such that everyone builds empathy for the sales organization. “That can be pipeline, number of intros into target companies.” That can be hopping on product eval, product feedback calls. It can be a number of things, but just really important that your executive team is in the trenches with you and with the organization to learn about the customers that we're building for. Today's show was brought to you by 11X, your all-in-one digital GTM team handling, creating,

   In Metrics

2. 3:36

   My hiring manager interview is to reverse the normal flow as normally that is an opening bios. Then you ask questions as the hiring manager, and then maybe you've got two, three, four or five minutes for questions from the candidate. I reverse this, do the opening, do quick bios, and then I open it and have the candidate ask me questions. “I'm basically treating this as a pseudo discovery call and I evaluate them on that of them doing” a discovery call on me and the company. And then I use that as a green shoot point to ask other questions about their experience. All right. We've done a lot of conversations around interviews, Andrew. First time somebody's talked about the reverse interview. Let's dig in a little bit. How do you start this interview? Very different. So they don't know it's coming.

   In SDR role-play assessments

3. 14:22

   I'll see you there. How are you thinking about prep for this? How much information or guidance are you giving them? We give them a frame, like a one pager around sides of company they're selling into who's on the call. I might be the underlying persona, so I might be the head of sales and I might have my director of enablement, for example, on the call. “We give them those roles, size of company, kind of current problems, and then overarching” goals that the company is looking for. Things that, hey, they're trying to grow from X, Y, Z, and the hope is that they can tease out enough discovery questions. We then have our own internal set of things that we will give them information on if they ask the discovery question on. So we try to give them enough so that they should think about the discovery questions

   In SDR role-play assessments

4. 14:40

   We give them those roles, size of company, kind of current problems, and then overarching goals that the company is looking for. Things that, hey, they're trying to grow from X, Y, Z, and the hope is that they can tease out enough discovery questions. We then have our own internal set of things that we will give them information on if they ask the discovery question on. “So we try to give them enough so that they should think about the discovery questions” that will get them more so they can understand the true value of the pain or what they're measured on and what might be focused on. As they uncover those things, we check them off and we'll give them more information. So the better discovery you do, the actual better your pitch will be because you're going to frame of your problem better. I never sold Twilio.

   In SDR role-play assessments

5. 20:17

   The HR people are like, I know I don't have a dog food stipend but I have a gym stipend or something like that. And just by changing the feature into the story, you'd be amazed how much more people will lean in just because you told someone a real experience that someone like them also had. “If you can pull from these little snippets of examples, and if you can drop a logo—that's” not necessary—but for example, if I'm selling Mark to you or another sales leader, I'll pull an example where I was in a conversation recently with a company and a VP of sales, and she was saying how she hopped on a call with a rep, and she didn't realize email was a problem until she opened up the email with this rep together, side-by-side, had

   In Proof and social proof

6. 21:03

   with customers. And when I tell that story, every sales leader is like, oh, that gives me anxiety. And pulling that fear and the anxiety sells the product. That is the story that is, I felt that fear or I feel that fear every day, and now here's the solution. Here's the thing that I can think about. And so that is like its own mini story. “If you can find enough of those and then throw them together in a sales conversation, it” can work really, really well. It's proven that humans are attracted to stories. It's a proven mechanism for information sharing. And it's funny, this is just so circumstantial, but last night my son and I were watching some crazy YouTube video and one of the things came up and it was like the U.S. memory champion.

   In Outbound case studies

7. 24:14

   I'll see you there. So Andrew, let's round out this mock pitch portion. And I want to talk about scoring criteria and your bar around certain things. And the reason I ask is I ran a similar mock pitch at PAVE. I also agree that the right way to do the mock pitch is to have them run discovery on “your product because that tells you whether or not they can think as opposed to just follow” a sales process. That said, because they're running discovery on my product, my bar is lower. So if I'm interviewing a mid-market seller or evaluating a mid-market seller in my organization, I'm not just looking for agenda, find a problem, next steps. I'm looking for some finesse.

   In SDR role-play assessments

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